A young sycamore sits at the center of a new memorial in Connecticut. The tree is surrounded by water held in a pool of gray stone, around which are carved 26 names: The children and educators killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting 10 years ago.
The architects behind the Newtown, CT memorial chose the sycamore for its beauty and its resilience; for its ability to flourish both in Connecticut’s lovely summers and its brutal winters. The tree’s symbolic nature was not lost on the families of the victims, who first saw the project at a private unveiling last month.
“The sycamore is a hardy tree, with a reputation for its ability to withstand punishment. Punishment, yes. Living with the horror of Dec. 14 is punishing,” JoAnn Bacon, whose daughter Charlotte was one of the first graders killed at the school, said at the memorial’s opening.
“But also, the sycamore has long been a symbol of love, protection, and fertility,” Bacon continued.
Evoking that broad range of human experience — grief, loss, healing, and hope — was vital for Daniel Affleck and Ben Waldo, the landscape architects who designed the memorial. But it wasn’t easy, they tell us. How do you memorialize one of our country’s darkest days while providing solace to the families of Sandy Hook? How do you remember the young lives taken without recalling the horrific way in which they were killed?
Nearly 200 proposed designs came in from all over the globe, and the submissions varied quite a bit, says the head of the memorial commission, Daniel Krauss. Some featured large stone panels like you’d find at war memorials, many included ponds, and some focused on a single dramatic statue at the center. Ultimately, what set Waldo and Affleck’s vision apart was its focus on healing, and providing Newtown a space where the town could process its shared trauma.
“We wanted to create a space that provided some relief, some sense of process for the folks in Newtown,” Waldo says. (The duo’s original vision probably cost somewhere in the ballpark of $50 million, Krauss says. Over the years, the architects scaled down the design while retaining its core elements, to drop the cost to $3.7 million.)
The memorial itself is situated on five-and-a-half acres of woodland, close enough to Sandy Hook that visitors can hear elementary-school children playing at recess. The original campus was torn down a year after the shooting. The new building is stunning, with an exterior wood paneling and large stained glass in its lobby, along with bullet-resistant doors.
Radiating around the sycamore are concentric paths, lined with shrubs of Winter Gold, dogwood trees, black-eyed Susans and other plants native to the Northeast, which would bloom at different points in the year and color the walking paths even in deep winter.
Plants that flowered in golds and oranges were selected, but the designers were careful to avoid using a lot of red in their palate, Waldo says, because they didn’t want to summon up images of violence. Some of the paths, which all eventually wind toward the center, are intentionally long and circuitous. Some routes allow you to cut directly toward the middle, or you can choose to get lost in the greenery.
The varied methods of approach were intentional. “They represent grief’s unique personality,” Bacon said of the walkways. “Whether done publicly or privately, it will present differently for everyone, even within families.”
Visitors to the memorial seem to have grasped that intuitively. “It’s been really gratifying for us that people go to the site and they stay,” Affleck says. “They circle the site and move at their own pace.”
When you reach the center of the memorial, you’re confronted with the names of the victims, and on a small island, across a shimmering pool of water, there’s that sycamore, which was placed at a remove for a reason, Affleck says.
“That was an important concept too,” he says. “The victims are always with you in the present like the branches of a tree, but you can’t quite get to them,” representing a beyond just out of our reach.
Krauss also finds the imagery of the tree — and its progress over time — to be deeply optimistic, too. When the memorial was opened this fall, the sycamore was slight, its trunk thin and supported by stakes. “Over the years, my hope is that you see the tree grow, and you can see this living, breathing memorial flourish,” he says.
